Dark Things I Adore

by Katie Lattari

  “No problem. Might get out to stretch.” I rub my hands on the thighs of my jeans and yawn, looking back out the window.

  Towering balsams, firs, and pines in varying depths of green all shimmy like ’20s flappers in the stiff breeze, birches wrapped like mummies in what looks to be peeling papyrus lean this way and that, grand oaks, maples, and chestnuts muscle in on one another, flared in their autumn robes; a motley conflagration under the dazzling mid-October sun. We are in the middle of a beautiful nowhere, digging into sprawling hinterlands, into territories of wild earth.

  The rolling, winding roads away from Bangor took us through towns with names like Charleston, Dover-Foxcroft, Monson, and Shirley, all with their own quaint, beautifully cinematic set dressing. It was like each was curated from grange hall flea markets and movie sets rife with small-town Americana. Stoic stone war memorials. American flags. Whitewashed, chipping town hall buildings from other centuries. Church bell towers in the actual process of tolling, gonging, calling. To me, the sound was ominous in a remote sort of way, unnamable.

  I glance over at Audra again, consider her, and wonder if my other students have found out about this little trip. They’ll be upset to hear I’ve undertaken this effort to work with and see Audra. They know I would never do the same for them. The admirers and the sycophants hate Audra. They deride her, mock her, belittle her and her work behind her back. But they’re mediocre, deluded self-consolers. She is better than them in almost every way. And they know it.

  But I understand her. Because I am her. Or was. Twenty-plus years ago, just starting out, full of ideas and energy and hunger and pure, unbridled talent. Dedicated to the work. I can cultivate her. I can make her greater than she ever could have been on her own. None of the others afford me that; not a one.

  When Audra first proposed this one-on-one visit, I’d been pleasantly surprised, even a little triumphant. But things couldn’t help but flicker back into memory like sunlight breaking through clouds. Images. Emotions. Colors: cadmium yellow, alizarin crimson, prism violet, cerulean blue. Just snippets, catches of history. I’d lived in Maine for two years, as a matter of fact—but as a much younger man. Barely more than a boy. It was decades ago; many bottles of wine and lovers and lines of cocaine and gallery showings and awards and lectures and semesters ago. So much has happened. So much has grown in the space between me and that capricious boy so far down the tunnel of time that he feels almost entirely obscured from me, insignificant to the man and artist I’ve become. I didn’t tell Audra any of that because my experience here all those years ago holds realities she might consider a little ugly. I didn’t want to ruin our fun. I didn’t want to ruin the potential such a trip might hold for us. I still don’t. So I’m treating this adventure like a clean slate, made just for me and her.

  “It’s another mile or two until we stop,” Audra tells me as her eyes track a big pickup roaring by. We pass the mouth of a private dirt driveway. POSTED: NO TRESPASSING NO HUNTING, a sign at its edge says. The dirt drive cuts a winding path up a steep embankment, through trees and gone, a scar in the hillside. Halfway up the densely forested slope, I see whorls of gray smoke lifting into the crystalline sapphire sky. I gaze over at Audra again, thinking of the desolation, the beauty, the shocking potential of pure color.

  “I can see you here,” I tell her, nodding. “I see you in this place.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. I thought you were mad to not go abroad to complete your thesis. Absolutely mad. Every young artist—every good artist—needs difference. It pushes you forward, opens up the imagination to go out there and see the world!” She smiles faintly, sagely as she listens to me, to the bite-size version of this speech of mine she’s heard many times before.

  “I know what my paintings need. They don’t need Istanbul. They need”—she takes a deep breath and then gestures around us, breathing out a sigh of pleasure—“this. And all of the money from those departmental awards will keep me comfortable right here.”

  “Seeing it now, like this, my guess is you’re right. It suits you. It suits your work.”

  “And wait until you see what I’ve been up to since my last update. Any doubts will be cleared away.” There is a devilish little twinkle in her eye. Reminds me of myself right before unveiling a masterwork to a hungry audience. The anticipation. The excitement.

  “You sound confident.”

  “I am confident,” she replies, sure as granite, light as a summer breeze. As ever, I think, not without some prickliness. But the sudden, joyful flash of her teeth and the uptick of her lips into a smile, the way her hair flares in the sun plunges me into wild, raw infatuation, that just-born kind of infatuation you feel at the beginning of every one of your own very best love stories. The sensation is of a rose reblooming, an egg re-cracking, a sweet, delicious pressure released. It has been this way with me since I met her. This inability to look away from her and what she creates. Even her sheer, bald confidence—I admit I’m the same way. Unwavering about my art. But where I am hotheaded, Audra is all coolness, steady and withholding.

  The coolness, the distancing ends this weekend, I’m sure. Why else invite me all the way the hell up here?

  A towering pile of stripped logs lies to one side of an industrial building to our left like Paul Bunyan’s cast-off toothpicks. The sign flies by: BOUCHARD TIMBER OUTFIT. The buildings on-site are done up as log cabins. Quaint.

  I reach down and dig in my leather satchel for a stick of gum to help me freshen up. Audra holds her hand out, and I give her one, too.

  “Thanks,” she says.

  I run my hand through my hair and roll my head around on my neck, feeling cooped up. I take my glasses off and polish the lenses with my T-shirt then return them to my face and take in Audra’s shoulder-length auburn hair. That heavenly nest that crowns her brilliant head and looks like it’s never brushed or combed and yet somehow remains so beautiful, effervescent. I look at the gentle, fine slopes of her skull, her arcs and parabolas sweet and harmonious. I look at her smooth skin dotted all over with faint constellations of freckles, she a galaxy unto herself. I look at the thick but never brutish auburn eyebrows that frame those deep, mysterious eyes. She must sense me studying her, because she turns her head to look at me, and there is a smile on her face, the gap between her front teeth beguiling.

  Her ease and warmth draw a smile out of me. Me and Audra, away together, enrobed in layer upon layer of color and beauty. She turns back to the road, but I keep looking at her. At her long, elegant neck. I imagine a sinewy, luxuriant body. I have imagined, but I have never been allowed to look, and I have never been allowed to touch. I have a prayer in my heart, in my mind, in my body.

  I have little doubt that my prayer will be answered. It always is.

  But with Audra, even my desire is different than with the others. In her I see the potential for true greatness, the potential to rise up in the art world and become someone. Someone like me. I wish to consume, yes. But I also wish to uplift. To steward and build the greatness that already exists within her that reminds me so much of myself. There is so much I could do for her. So much I could show her. So much I could teach her if Audra would only be willing to take what is hers. Courage is what’s needed to become great. I learned that very early on.

  And now this invitation. I’m like a vampire over the threshold.

  “Professor Durant!” She laughs, the sound round and loud and hearty, like carved wooden orbs tossed in the air. “You’re nothing but a crystal-clear drinking glass, sir. I can see right into you.”

  I laugh, hearing in her voice that we both understand everything about this weekend. That the game is afoot. She has the preternatural ability to see me better than most. Sometimes to my delight. Often to my chagrin. She brushes some hair behind her ear, revealing a bright-yellow enamel bird earring pressed to her lobe.

  “Where in the hell are we, anyway, Colfax?”
I ask with a smile of my own, relaxing into my seat, hands clasped in my lap, some quiet, hidden gears of desire switched on, counting down. I gaze back through the windshield as we rise farther and farther uphill, the road seemingly cut straight through an ancient, sprawling wood.

  “The forest primeval. The last best place. My heart of darkness,” she incants, that round laugh bounding out of her again. “Greenville, Maine. The Moosehead Lake Region, bub.” Greenville, Maine. Moosehead Lake.

  My pulse quickens in a stab. My gaze is suddenly keen, eyes skipping from one random object to another as if something out there will reverse the truth of it. As if some radical difference in the terrain will reveal my memory as false. But no. Greenville, Maine. I have been there before. Here before. My brow creases like paper. My heart seems to be working harder and faster than the car itself, like it might leave my body and arrive before the rest of me.

  As we climb to the top of the hill, two things emerge: to the right is a small shopping center with a large sign at the road announcing it as the Dirigo Hill Trading Post, and out beyond the apex of the hill is a grand, brochure-ready vista—sprawling miles of trees broken up by thin, snaking roads and the vast, interconnected mirror rounds of a giant lake.

  Holy shit.

  Audra is saying something, but I don’t really hear her. I swallow and work to silently manage my breathing, calm my nerves. I think of my yoga training. I think of my breath. I count. I center.

  One, two, three.

  One, two, three.

  “Is that Moosehead Lake down there, the one you just said?” I swallow, putting on a smile. “Of the Moosehead Lake Region?” I ask this in my best chamber-of-commerce voice as she flips on her right turn signal and pulls us into the parking lot of the Dirigo Hill Trading Post. But I already know the answer. I feel like I’m inside a dream; but I can’t tell if it’s mine or somebody else’s.

  “It is indeed.” She smiles her crooked Colfax smile. My god. My prayer for her, the baser one, is like a nervous, struggling bird in my hands, fighting to be set free. But my shock at being back in this place threatens to squeeze that nervous, struggling bird to death. “So, yeah. We’re in Greenville, now.” Her eyes pass back and forth quickly across the parking lot, watching for any cars coming toward us from funny angles. I take three quiet, meditative breaths. “About an hour and a half northwest of where I picked you up in Bangor. So, driving, you’re about…five and a half, six hours from Boston right now. But only about an hour and a half from the Canadian border,” she tells me as the car crackles over the broken asphalt and pulls into a parking space near the supermarket part of the trading post. “Does that help to orient you a little?” Her hinky smile returns. “I bet you didn’t even google it before you came,” she says, throwing the wagon into park. I lean forward and peer out at the structure of the place.

  “I’m…not sure how it would have helped me if I did,” I say, leaning back, taking it all in. My eyes stay glued on the buildings. “Why worry about such things when traveling with a native?” I take off my seatbelt and swipe my hands through my hair, once, twice, three times in quick succession. Audra cuts the engine and pulls the keys from the ignition.

  A need pulses through me. To touch her. As if feeling her body might ground me, might save me. But I don’t touch her. Not yet. No.

  “You have the faith of an altar boy.”

  “When Audra Colfax is your god, a man’s faith can be boundless,” I reply with a slight delay. I lean forward toward the sloped glass of the windshield. She tosses her head back and laughs again, that big, unaffected laugh. I look over at her, my gaze ungluing from the trading post.

  “Now tell me, Professor Durant,” she says, her voice almost a whisper. “Am I a cruel god or a benevolent god?” I want to bite those pretty lips of hers, nick them with my teeth, speckle them with blood. Hold fast to the prayer, Max.

  “You are a creature of kindness,” I say, low and slow, leading her down my primrose path. Something about looking at her steadies me a bit. Her eyes brood with energy. I can feel it. I know the look well: I have seen it on the faces of so many lovers and soon-to-be lovers. She draws away from me, laughing to herself, and pulls her purse onto her lap from the back seat.

  “I have the house stocked with just about anything and everything we could ever need. But I have to use the restroom. You stay here. I’ll be right back.”

  “Audra—” I say and find I’m not sure what to follow it with. She turns and looks at me. Those milk-chocolate eyes of hers drip into me, her lips slightly parted—perfect little raspberries. Hesitation rises and makes me stop, knowing that if I go much further, I won’t have any choice.

  “How far to your place?” It’s almost a plea.

  “Forty minutes,” she says. Can I bear forty minutes? I sit back in my seat, taking a few breaths, trying to reverse biology. Think of cold showers, the Queen of England, that disemboweled porcupine on the road twenty miles ago. Fresh and slick with balloon-like organs spilling from its belly. She laughs gently. “I know,” she says, her voice seeming to understand. I look at her and wonder if she does. If she really understands. Her eyes scan all around my face, her own a mosaic of compassion, heat, tenderness, agitation, and impatience; it seems to mirror mine. She sits back in her seat, and we both look forward out the windshield, trying to cool off. She sighs, and it is like a lonely, historic wind sweeping across a great western plain. Desolation and desire; that’s my Audra. I swallow and take another breath, looking at shoppers moving in and out of the front entrance of the supermarket. Many a man and woman is wearing flannel, thermals, puffy jackets.

  “Hunting season?” I ask, looking at a man wearing a camouflage sweatshirt and a bright-orange knit cap. There are others, I realize, plenty of others in similar garb.

  “Oh, yes,” Audra says. “Bear, deer, moose right now. This is a very popular area for hunting.”

  How bizarre to be here once again. The scene conjures itself before me like a terrible magic trick, a palimpsest. There had been fewer cars. The lot wasn’t paved then. The supermarket had been smaller, less modern, and named something else. But the general angles, the spatial arrangements, the site at the top of the hill: yes. Déjà vu ripples through me like a bad lunch beginning to announce itself hours before the final disaster. My stomach twists, and I feel an unease settle. I never thought I would return. I told myself I never would.

  I gaze at Audra, the brightness of the lemon-yellow birds at her ears pinging in the air.

  It was many years ago, yes. I force my shoulders to release their tension. So many years. Such a very long time ago that it may as well not even be the same place. The same life.

  Audra

  Friday, October 19, 2018

  I’m exiting the trading post bathroom, leather wallet in hand, when I catch sight of him. He’s moving away from a set of cash registers with a green plastic shopping bag. He’s a tall tree trunk of a man, strong and sturdy and almost heavyset, with a day’s scruff, a handsome, boyish face, and good, unkempt hair. Lance Peters. I look around me, thrown off-balance at seeing him and feeling relieved I was able to convince Max to stay in the car while I made this pit stop. I pause not far from the bathroom, unsure of what to do.

  He looks surprised when he notices me. I bet I do, too. Lance and I go way back. We met in seventh grade, Trapper Keepers and all. As teenagers, we shot guns on my family’s property, went skinny-dipping with our friends in Moosehead Lake, got drunk and a little handsy with each other up in the long-abandoned cabins at Lupine Valley. And recently, we’ve reconnected between my trips to Boston.

  “I can say with complete honesty that I did not expect to see you in the camouflage walkie-talkie section of Dirigo Hill today,” he says as he comes to greet me. His eyes are warm, but there’s also something else in them. Like he wants to ask me if I’m okay but can’t bring himself to do it out loud. It’s been a little while since we�
�ve seen each other. Longer than either of us would like, I think.

  “Me neither,” I acknowledge. “Just in the last leg of driving up from Bangor. Had to take a break.”

  “But back on the road now?” He turns his head in the direction of the exit, the parking lot. Like he’s trying to catch a glimpse of someone.

  “Back on the road now.” I nod and touch his arm gently, bringing his attention back to me, away from my car, from Max.

  “I take it your professor or advisor guy or whatever-he-is is somewhere here?”

  A fine, silken web of nerves flares white-hot in my body. He may try to play it cool, but Lance knows his name. Lance knows he’s with me. I nod.

  He takes a breath and places a hand softly against my ear and hair.

  “Been able to sleep?”

  “As much as I can,” I sigh, looking around us. “A bit.” I know I should go. I know I should speed this along and send Lance on his way so I can get on mine. But being with him is bracing. I need it.

  “Shotgun ammo?” I ask, trying to squint and see some box markings through the bag.

  “Yep. And plenty of it,” he says, hands working the plastic bag to show me. I count at least five or six boxes. “Anyway. I should head on. My buddies and Uncle Marc are waiting for me in the truck.”

  Marc?

  “You’re hanging with Marc?” I ask, rattled. I swallow and steady myself.

  “I know, I know—he’s a tool,” he says with a sigh.

  “He’s a violent, drunken maniac,” I correct, my blood boiling. I cannot believe he’s hanging out with Marc. Lance and the rest of his family have been estranged from him for years. And with damn good reason.

  “I know—but he’s my dad’s brother, and Dad asked me to check in on the guy. My dad’s been on me about it for a month. I guess he’s been a wreck since Minnie left him.” We’re both quite sure Marc used to hit Minnie, his long-term, live-in girlfriend, but I don’t say it now. “I guess the guy is doing the Twelve Steps.”